Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,482 66,831 55.93% 238

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 3631 6196 5 1077
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2745 4440 14 289
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 2735 4615 7 905
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 2681 5032 7 1413
21 West Anchorage 2576 4339 7 942
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2527 4319 6 833
27 Anchorage - Basher 2488 4113 5 730
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2303 4053 2 728
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2176 3698 17 858
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2170 3849 7 764
34 Mendenhall Valley 2162 4081 11 2013
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2140 3743 6 1000
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2017 3401 7 595
04 Western Fairbanks 2001 3511 4 1160
31 Homer/South Kenai 1936 4175 7 20
35 Sitka/Petersburg 1870 3274 10 17
17 Anchorage - University 1782 3140 3 665
23 Anchorage - Taku 1683 3023 10 635
29 North Kenai 1627 3052 8 21
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1601 3033 7 994
11 Greater Palmer 1518 2696 13 1534
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1515 2580 8 715
10 Rural Mat-Su 1505 2778 2 935
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1493 2665 5 191
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1490 2715 5 969
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1489 2784 8 6
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1478 2410 1 245
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1242 2240 5 1057
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1204 2141 4 672
15 Elmendorf 1195 2209 8 343
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1184 2207 7 3
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1160 2172 4 340
07 Greater Wasilla 1155 2279 4 1536
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1145 2355 2 17
03 North Pole/Badger 909 1696 3 513
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 836 1500 1 403
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 574 1195 5 16
38 Lower Kuskokwim 349 653 0 6
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 268 525 2 215
40 Arctic 233 541 1 9
99 NA 38 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.